2.5/5 stars
Lead cast: Bae Suzy, Yang Se-jong
Fantasy romantic dramas are a dime a dozen in the Korean TV landscape, and while Netflix’s latest love story, Doona!, isn’t in the least bit supernatural, the story is every bit as fantastical as the time-travel or superpowered romantic sagas we’ve grown accustomed to.
A young man moves into shared student housing in Seoul and finds himself interacting daily with an unlikely neighbour, a K-pop superstar taking a break from the spotlight. This heady concept is cleverly reinforced by the show’s casting.
Bae Suzy, a real-life superstar who began her career in the girl group Miss A, plays the ethereal next-door K-pop beauty Lee Doona. Meanwhile, the still relatively unknown Yang Se-jong (Still 17), who only launched an Instagram account last week, is the fresh-faced engineering student Lee Won-jun.
Won-jun is a top student who aims to study hard and tutor part time to pay his way through college. He’s driven up from the countryside by his best friend, a lively young fellow whose truck is festooned with merchandise of the K-pop band Dream Sweet.
Dropping Won-jun off in the South Korean capital, the friend jokingly asks him to say ‘Hi’ to Lee Doona, his favourite member of Dream Sweet.
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Won-jun moves into a house on a hill, where he shares the second floor with two colourful male students. On the way in, he meets the mysterious solo resident of the first floor, who smokes pensively outside.
He feels he has met her somewhere before, but can’t quite place her.
After that they keep bumping into each other – she seems to wile away entire days smoking outside in an array of casual, but very fashionable outfits, never straying beyond the property.
It soon hits him – his first-floor neighbour is none other than K-pop star Lee Doona, who has been laying low after pausing her activities with Dream Sweet. He is mortified to realise this as he has been wearing his friend’s Dream Sweet hoodie and humming their songs around her.
After he convinces her that he’s not a stalker – though one does appear later – they start to truly get to know each other.
Won-jun isn’t interested in Doona romantically at first, and perhaps this is what sparks her interest in him. With nothing else to do, she hounds him constantly until he relents and agrees to share a meal with her.
Even by the generous standards of K-dramas, Doona! is a drawn-out affair. The lion’s share of the story is devoted to the slowly advancing relationship between Doona and Won-jun, with Won-jun’s high school crush Jinju presenting only the most fleeting of obstacles.
Supporting characters don’t get much of a look-in – not that they are a particularly exciting bunch.
Why the romance advances at such a glacial pace is something of a mystery, particularly seeing as Doona all but throws herself at Won-jun early in the series.
The notion that a young, single male student wouldn’t be interested in a dazzling K-pop star seems even more far-fetched than the show’s basic premise.
Beyond her looks and dreamy allure, Doona honestly doesn’t have much going for her, making it hard for us to root for this relationship to succeed. Won-jun studies and works hard and eventually does everything for Doona as well, including saving her from a locked bathroom.
For her part, Doona mopes around without any direction. Granted she’s on hiatus after suffering some kind of K-pop-related burnout, but this aspect of her character is conveyed nebulously through cliched visuals of the tormented artist, such as a repeated motif of her drowning.
As we’ve come to expect from Netflix dramas, which benefit from the streaming platform’s deeper pockets, Doona! looks the business, with hazy visuals and atmospheric lighting blanketing each frame, but it’s superficial to a fault.
As with any successful romance, perhaps what this show needed was a bit more confidence.
Doona! is streaming on Netflix.
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Khushi Patel is a science fiction author who lives in Austin, Texas. She has published three novels, and her work has been praised for its originality and imagination. Khushi is a graduate of Rice University, and she has worked as a software engineer. She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and her books have been nominated for several awards.
